Scott.

At last I was alone. The landlord, douce man, could stand no more; his conversation had been large and ample up to midnight, and had indeed left a fair remainder to spread a feast for solitude; but for the last two hours he had done nothing but alternately yawn and doze.

Now, thank goodness, he had gone, and I could read in peace.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us—Bacon's Essays and Donnelly's Cryptogram!—in the parlour of a shabby old inn! Was mine host, then, of a literary turn? Ay, I had noted his gushing praise of Burns and Walter Scott; and, by the way, what was it he said about Shakespeare's visit to Edinburgh? He had shown me a letter in a book: I had been too intensely bored by his trowelled praise of Scottish lochs, Scottish mountains, haggis, parritch, usquebaugh, and Scottish poetry, to pay much heed—but yes, this must be it. Drummond's Sonnets, and here evidently was the letter, signed by Ben Jonson, indorsed "to my very good friend, the lairde of Hawthornden":—

Master vill,

quhen we were drinking at my Lordis on Sonday, you promised yat you would gett for me my Lordis coppie he lent you of my Lord Sempill his interlude callit philotas, and qhuich vill Shakespeare told me he actit in edinburt, quhen he wes yair wit the players, to his gret contentment and delighte. My man waits your answer:

So give him the play,
And lette him awaye
To your assured friend
and loving servand,

Ben Jonson.

From my lodging in the canongait,

Mrch the twelft, 1619.

So here also had Shakespeare anticipated me? Had he been to Edinburgh too?

I might have known: but lo! I grow so used to our resemblances, I almost cease to notice them.

Donnelly too! I had never seen his book before—though I have taken keen interest in the subject ever since Delia Bacon arose in—well, the land where they do raise Bacon—and found Shakespeare out.

Could it indeed be true that Shakespeare was an ignorant impostor, whose business it was to hold respectable gentlemen's horses at the stage-door of the theatre, instead of which he wickedly suborned the Lord High Chancellor of England to write his plays for him, and the same with intent to deceive?

To make sure, I read a few pages of Donnelly.

Even that failed to convince me: the more I read, the more I didn't know.

I saw Shakespeare's Works on the bookshelf, and reached the volume down. It opened at the Sonnets.

Ah! what exquisite music! But—what was this?

Again in Sonnet XXXVIII.—

And in the next:—

Curious, surely. What could these lines mean?

And again:—

My life hath in this line some interest.

What if the true cryptogram were concealed in this strangely emphasised and deeply noted line? What if it were left to me to solve the mystery?

By Jove! here was a discovery! Writing "interest" "interrest," as it would be written in the manuscript, the letters in the line spell the words

"Mistress Mary Fitton";

and Mistress Mary Fitton, as everybody knows, is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the lady who had "her Will, and Will to boot, and Will in overplus"; to wit, Will Shakespeare; her young lover, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; and the respectable elderly lover whom she was plighted to marry at his wife's death—Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of the Household to Queen Elizabeth!

Mary Fitton's identity with the lady of the Sonnets has been established beyond question by Lady Newdegate's publication of Passages in the Lives of Anne and Mary Fitton. The perfect anagram which I had accidentally discovered in the most pointedly accentuated line in the whole of the Sonnets, was therefore something more than curious.

I next took the entire passage:—

After an hour's wrestling I had extracted from the letters forming these four lines, these words:—

"Learn ye that have a little wit y^t Francis Bacon these lines to Mistress Mary Fitton, Elizabeth's maid of honour at Whitehalle, hath writt."

But the anagram was imperfect. Several letters included in the words of the sonnet, remained unused in my anagram.

It was maddening to arrive so near success, to touch it as it were with one's, finger tips, yet fail for a few foolish trifling alphabetic signs.

Desperately, frantically, I struggled to complete and perfect the anagram; but the more I juggled with the letters, the more bewildered, mazed, and helpless I became. My blood was a-fire, my head a horrible ache, my brain a whirling tornado of dancing vowels and consonants.

The excitement, if still fed and unsatisfied, must lead, I felt, to brain fever or madness.

I tore myself from the intoxicating pursuit, and fell, restless, sleepless, yet painfully weary, upon the couch beneath the window.

It was a wild winter's night, and the view outside was full of "fowle horror and eke hellish dreriment." The cordon of turrets girding the city bulged eerily through the heavy gloom like limbs of a skeleton starkly protruding through a lampblack shroud. A beam of lurid moonlight uncannily lit up a distant stretch of bluff, stern crags, and nearer spectral foreground of towers, gables, and bartisans.

Deep down in the hollow, dismal and desolate, under a sky of raven's feathers, glowered murder-stained Holyrood, congenial to the night. The solitary glimmer on the thunder and battle-scarred Castle Rock, looked like a match held up to show the darkness.

The melancholy patter of the rain, and the discordant creaking and rattling of an iron shutter and rusty hinge, made music harmonious to the scene.

The air of the musty room added to the contagious heaviness. In vain I stretched the astral sceptre of the soul upon the incorporeal pavement of conjecture. Nothing came of it, except that I slipped off the couch. I was too restless to think. Even the dog, on the rug at my feet, uneasily twitched and growled in his sleep.

Suddenly, I became conscious of a creepy chill; my head, by some impulse foreign to my volition, was raised from its meditative pose; and in the spluttering, dying beam of the lamp's light, I beheld an Apparition.

A grim and grisly goblin, of unwholesome oatcake hue, fluttered (no other word describes the wild and fitful unreliability of his movements) before my startled gaze; his eyes, like glassy beads, shone horridly.

My dog raised his head, and looked over his shoulder. When his gaze fell on the Apparition he bounded to his feet, his limbs shaking like jelly, his eyes projecting like shining stars, and his hair standing up round his neck like a frill.

He tried to growl, but the sound, shaken and softened by terror, issued to the night in lamb-like bleats. Yet more appalled by his vocal failure, he shrank, still feebly bleating, backwards under the sofa.

For my part, I believe I may say I was not afraid, but intensely excited. I felt that something was about to be revealed to me; this was the reason why my hand trembled so as to knock Shakespeare, Bacon, and Donnelly in one commingled heap of fallen glory to the floor.

I was curious, fascinated, and highly wrought.

The wild and fitful little shape bewilderingly wriggled and flickered in the light, and his ghast and fixed eye was painful to endure. Yet I felt that we two had not met without reason. Instinct told me we should do business.

He was the jerkiest and perkiest little figure I had ever clapped eyes on. He bore his head with confident, nay impudent, erectness; his arms waved like a windmill's; and his shapeless little legs straddled all over the place in a succession of purposeless leaps and flings and prancings.

So quick and fidgety were his movements that it was not easy to catch the details of his dress; but I saw that his tartan was a spider's web, to whose check the slimy snail had imparted a variety of hue unknown to Macgregor or Macpherson; his bonnet was a flowering thistle; his philabeg was made of the beards of oat-florets; his buckle was a salmon's scale; and a blade of finest rye dangled proudly by his side.

"Ye'll know me the noo if ye'll speir lang enoo," he squealed ironically when I had stared for some moments. "Gape and glower till your lugs crack, but ye canna' alter the fact that a' great men are Scots. Burrrns was Scottish, and Allan Ramsay, and Blair, and Thomson, Smollett, and Hume, and Boswell, and Adam Smith, and Stewart, and Hogg, and Campbell; and ay, Sir Walter Scott, Tam Carlyle, and Lord Brougham; and Chalmers, and Brewster, and Lyell, and Livingstone, and Macbeth, and McGinnis; Macchiaveli, the Maccabees; and Macaronis, the Macintoshes and Macrobes; and what reason hae ye to suppose that the author of Shakespeare's Plays was an exception?"

"Oh, I don't know," I said, "but—er—have I had the pleasure of meeting you before?"

"Bah!" said he, hastily dancing a strathspey, "ma fute is on ma native dew, ma name is Roderick; I am," he continued, drawing himself up to the full height of his figure, which was about six inches, "I am the Speerit o' Scottish Literature."

"Oh, I know you now," I said, "you're the spirit men call the Small Scotch."

"Where will ye find the Small Scotch that's fu' sax inches in height?" answered Roderick, with asperity.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," I said. "But I didn't ring for you, did I?"

"I'm no slave o' the ring," proudly answered Roderick, as he broke into the opening steps of a complicated sword-dance. "I came of my ain sweet will, just to improve your mind."

"That's very kind," said I; "will you take a chair, or a tumbler?"

The Spirit hissed angrily, as if a small soda had been poured over him, and I prudently abstained from further interruptions.

As some of my readers are perhaps less fluently acquainted with the Scotch than myself, I take the liberty of translating into English the conversation which ensued.

The Spirit began by asking whether I regarded Shakespeare as the greatest poet that ever lived, or as the meanest sweater that ever exploited the gifts of the helpless poor—meaning in this case Francis Bacon.

I responded that I did not think Bacon a man of that sort.

"Well," continued the Spirit, "do you think that a man who could scarcely write his own name could write Hamlet?"

"It is a nice point," I said.

"Very well," said the Spirit, dancing a series of fantastic Highland flings in the unsubstantial air, and turning a double somersault at the finish; "if, as everybody admits, Bacon was one of the blackest scoundrels that ever lived, his mind could not have conceived the noble philosophy to which his name is attached. And if Shakespeare, as the signature to his will shows, could scarcely write his own name, he could not have written his own Plays."

"Same again," said I.

"Besides which," continued the Spirit, "neither Shakespeare nor Bacon was a Scotsman."

"That settles 'em," quoth I.

"Now, look at here," continued the Spirit, aggressively shaking his forefinger under my nose; "whoever wrote Shakespeare's Plays must have written Shakespeare's Sonnets."

"Undoubtedly," said I.

"And the Sonnets were dedicated by the publisher to 'W. H.,' who is styled 'the onlie begetter of these ensuing Sonnets.'"

"Well?"

"The publisher must have known who the author was."

"Very likely."

"And in referring to the 'onlie begetter,' he clearly implies that the authorship was claimed by many, and in furnishing no more than the initials of 'the onlie begetter,' he indicates that the real author had reasons for concealing the authorship."

"That may be so."

"Well, why should a man desire to conceal his authorship of such exquisite sonnets—sonnets of whose surpassing excellence he himself is so convinced that he writes—

—unless the Sonnets contained matter likely to bring him into trouble? For instance, if a man had, in the fervour of his youth, poured out such warm expression of his love as the Sonnets contain, and very earnestly desired, later on in life, to marry another lady, he might be anxious then that the authorship of the Sonnets should be temporarily forgotten. But Bacon never did marry. And Shakespeare married young, and deserted his wife; and she survived his death. Therefore, no such motive for secrecy could have affected Bacon or Shakespeare."

At this point of his inductive reasoning, the Spirit paused for effect: he looked for all the world like a picture I had seen in the Strand Magazine.

"Ah!" I said, "I know you now; you are Sherlock Holmes, the detective."

At which he was so indignant that he angrily pirouetted himself right out of sight. But he re-appeared almost immediately, and went on as if nothing had happened:—

"Having proved to you that neither Bacon nor Shakespeare wrote his own works, I will now proceed to tell you who wrote them."

"What! The lot?"

"Certainly. The similarity of thought in Bacon's Essays and Shakespeare's Plays prove that they were written by the same man. That man, as you may see by the legal knowledge betrayed alike in the Plays and the Essays, must have studied the law. But if he wrote all the books which I attributed to him, he could not have had time to practise it. Moreover, in the atmosphere of the law courts a man could have preserved neither the exquisite sweetness nor the human grandeur of the so-called Shakespeare's Plays."

"There's something in that," said I.

"Very well," continued Roderick, curveting so swiftly that even as one foot touched the floor the other seemed to be kicking the ceiling, "we have now established these facts:—

"First, that the initials of the author of the so-called Shakespeare's Plays are 'W. H.'

"Secondly, that he had an intensely painful love affair in his youth, and married another woman in his later years.

"Thirdly, that he was a lawyer by education but not by practice.

"Now, who was he? We have yet more evidence to aid us in identifying him. There's Spenser's plaint that 'our pleasant Willy,' 'the man whom Nature's self had made to mock herself and truth to imitate,' had been 'dead of late,' and 'with him all joy and merriment.' We have also the lines in the Sonnets:—

The first name of 'W. H.,' therefore, is Will. And this Will had great trouble at one period of his life, which silenced all his joy and merriment. Again I ask you, Who was the man?"

And the Spirit, bubbling and shaking with eagerness, peered anxiously into my face.

"What great Scotsman of that great period," he continued, screaming rather than speaking, "was brought up to the law and abandoned it for the pursuit of literature and poetry? was driven nearly to distraction by the loss of a mistress whom he loved more dearly than life? went abroad to seek solace, and, returning after many years, married another lady? wrote and left extant in his own name, sonnets which are acknowledged to be perfect models of sweetness and delicacy, sonnets which have never been eclipsed since his death? who was the Scottish poet, friend of the London actors; friend of Ben Jonson; the man who has left on record in British literature the report of his conversations with Jonson; the man who, as you have to-night seen by your landlord's letter, knew Shakespeare and lent him plays which are not known now by the names they then bore—come, come, man, who is this W. H.? Cannot you guess it even now?"

"William of Hawthornden?"

"Of course, of course," the Spirit cried. "Look you, now, how plain it is. William Drummond of Hawthornden was tinged with the conceits and romances of the Italian school, as was the author of Romeo and Juliet. He wrote histories, as did the author of The History of Henry VII., attributed to Bacon; as did the author of the historical plays, attributed to Shakespeare. He wrote many reflections on Death, as did the author of the Sonnets and the Plays. And who but a Scotsman, I would like you to tell me, could have furnished the local colour and the Scottish character to the tragedy of Macbeth?"

"Why, man, it's as plain as a pikestaff. The greatest Englishman that ever lived was naturally a Scotsman. The greatest genius of any clime or time was William Drummond of Hawthornden."

And, in the frenzy of his exultation, Roderick leaped high again into the air, turned seventeen somersaults in succession, and, alighting upon my nose, danced a wild Highland fling of triumph and defiance.

It was certainly very plausible—as plausible, at least, as any argument that I had heard in support of the theory that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's Plays. I was almost persuaded: then a difficulty occurred to me.

"But," I said, "Drummond of Hawthornden was not born till 1585, and some of Shakespeare's Plays appear to have been produced before 1593."

"Well," answered the Spirit, carelessly sticking his sword into my nose and sitting on it, "what has age to do with genius? Has not another poet said, 'He was not of an age, but for all time'? Besides, the Scottish are a precocious people and byordinar'. And furthermore, who told you that Drummond was born in '85?"

"English history says so."

"English history!" answered the Spirit, with a sneer; "try Scotch."

"But," I still objected, "if Shakespeare wrote nothing, why did Ben Jonson, who knew him well, praise his wit and his 'gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped'?"

"Well," said Roderick, "and who said that Shakespeare wrote nothing? I only said he did not write Shakespeare's Works. But he wrote other poetry—poetry which everybody knows—poetry as familiar in every child's mouth as butterscotch. There is nothing finer of its kind."

"It is strange," I muttered, "that I have never heard of it."

"What?" cried the Spirit, "never heard of 'Little Jack Horner'?

"And is that Shakespeare's?" I exclaimed.

"And what for no'? It is a perfect specimen of pure Anglo-Saxon English, without corrupt admixture of Norman or Roman words. It is terse and dramatic. The very first line, in its revelation of the hero's remote and solitary state, presents a powerful suggestion of a contemplative character. His voracity, tempered by intense conscientiousness, is indicated in a few clear, pertinent touches that unmistakably betoken the master-hand. Yet the author's name is lost in the dust of the centuries; it has eluded the vigilance of antiquarian research. Only I am acquainted with the secret. If you doubt it, turn the poem into an anagram, and the truth shall be clear even to you."

"But," I began, "if"—

"Bah! Look at here!" cried Roderick, jumping to his feet and brandishing his sword, "I came here to improve your mind; but if you are not amenable to reason, it's no use talking. So get out of it, ye puir, daft, gawkie Southron loon!"

And so saying, he struck me so terrible a blow across the nose with his sword that I sneezed, and lo, behold! he was gone, and in the place where he had been, was nothing but a great, busy, buzzing moth, that hovered round my nose as though it had been a joy-beacon.

It was a strange experience. I don't know what to make of it. But I don't think that Shakespeare was Bacon. And, as I hadn't the slightest trace of headache when I awoke, I think that, after all, the Scottish Spirit was right. Bacon hasn't a ham to stand on. Bacon is smoked. To honest nostrils Bacon hereafter is rancid.

Be that as it may, there can be no doubt henceforth as to the authorship of "Little Jack Horner." Following Roderick's instructions, I have taken the letters of the lines of that poem, and have constructed with them an anagram which establishes beyond possibility of dispute that Shakespeare wrote them.

I am prepared to prove it to the British Association, and defy The Daily Chronicle. It is true the spelling is rather bad, but Shakespeare's was notoriously beastly, so that is another proof in my favour.

It is moreover a perfect anagram, in which each letter is used, and used once only. The letters are Little jack horner sat in a corner eating a christmas pie he pulled out a plum with his finger and thumb and said what a good boy am i.

Now, mark, hey presto! there's no deception; mix these letters and form them into new combinations, and you evolve this remarkable, startling, conclusive, and scientifically historical revelation:—

Mistir Shakesper aloan was the Lyturery gent wich rote this Bootiful Pome in Elizabuth Raign, and Jaimce had Damn Good Lauph.

Could anything be clearer?